this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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The Justice Department's proposal to force Google to rein in and even sell off its Chrome browser business may seem like a win for competitors such as Mozilla’s Firefox browser. But the company says the plan risks hurting smaller browsers.

In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering "something of value" to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices.

The problem is that Mozilla earns most of its revenue from royalty deals—nearly 86% in 2022—making Google the default Firefox browser search engine.

"If implemented, the prohibition on search agreements with all browsers regardless of size and business model will negatively impact independent browsers like Firefox and have knock-on effects for an open and accessible internet,” Mozilla says. “As written, the remedies will harm independent browsers without material benefit to search competition.”

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

What smaller browsers?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

The comments are a who's who of anarchists. Watch them burn it all down and end up with Microsoft owning the dominant browser again. Idiots...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Do… do you even know what an anarchist is???

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Lmao so you're a self-professed idiot.

Nothing to see here, folks. Just a dumb child smelling their own farts 😂

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 hour ago
[–] [email protected] 216 points 2 days ago (4 children)

May I be frank? I suspect that, in the long run, Mozilla not getting this money will actually benefit Firefox. Sure, so exec will get pissed as they won't get 5.6 million dollars a year, and Firefox won't get some weird nobody-asked-for feature that'll be ditched some time later; but I think that they'll focus better on the browser this way. Specially because whoever is paying the dinner is the one picking the dish, and with a higher proportion of their effective income coming from donations, what users want will stop being so neglected.

Just my two cents.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

WTF‽

"The head of Mozilla earned roughly $5.6 Million during 2021."

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Excuse me, where do I fill out the form to have the first $30,696 of my salary processed as non taxable benefit? Please and thank you

[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 day ago

I totally agree.

Frankly, Mozilla should be embarrassed to have released this statement.

It's basically 'Please don't harm our competitor for corruptly bribing rivals! We like those bribes very much!'

[–] [email protected] 69 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Firefox won’t get some weird nobody-asked-for feature that’ll be ditched some time later

Nah, the features nobody asked for will just be limited to ones that will provide a revenue stream.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

However once they lose the googlebux, a meaningful part of the revenue stream will be donations. And features implemented because of donators asking for them are, typically, things that we users desire.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

Donations are not sustainable. Many open-source projects tried them, and the only thing they can cover are server costs or conferences, developers are still working for free on their own time.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 day ago (10 children)

Yeah but in the short term the company will literally go out of business

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not likely. Mozilla had $1,321,539,000 in total assets -- roughly half a billion dollars of which was in "cash and cash equivalents" -- in their last (2022) audited financial statement: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago

Y'know, you're right & that's wild. I guess I should have known, but didn't assume that they have like 600m in unrelated investments. Though the burn rate is quite a lot too, so they probably would scale back browser dev a lot if it lost its profitability & become a pure VC kinda org

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I care about Firefox and Thunderbird, not Mozilla. The software is open source and will persist.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The way Mozilla can advocate for web standards will be sorely missed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago

To my knowledge they don't though, Chrome has had the overall market share for years. Most of the time them is a little project is tailing behind Chrome, because anything that they add to Chrome if the other browsers didn't follow suit they were left in the dust. I haven't seen the Mozilla project as a Trailblazer in years

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's unfortunate, but it still needs to happen. Mozilla will adapt.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

They haven't launched a successful product in a decade. Pretty sure they'll get more desperate and have even more misses. Probably AI.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

mozilla ai sold to antrophic?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

Eh. Given how dead Thunderbird was, I feel it's fair enough to call it's recent massive renewal a launch.

And fkr what it's worth, their recent 'AI' endeavours have been private offline language translation (i.e. no sending data to Google translation servers), and better screen reader functionality for blind people. Both good features.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 day ago (1 children)

"Listen, making the entire market dependent on one corporate benefactor just sothey aren't a 100% monopoly and only a 99% one is important"

Jesus Christ Mozilla, do you hear yourself?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago

Remember, Mozilla spends more on executives and their “outreach” programs than they spend on Firefox developers.

[–] [email protected] 137 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

what Mozilla is really afraid of is losing the over inflated bonus the execs get paid.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Mozilla needs to ditch their CEO and maybe even their board. They’ve lost their way all because the leadership is greedy

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 hours ago

That’s mistaking a structural problem for a personal one. Zeynep Tufekci has a great argument about why that wouldn’t work:

It’s reasonable, for example, for a corporation to ponder who would be the best CEO or COO, but it’s not reasonable for us to expect that we could take any one of those actors and replace them with another person and get dramatically different results without changing the structures, incentives and forces that shape how they and their companies act in this world.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I understand why Mozilla would want to keep the money coming from Google, but it might also be good for them to be less dependent from Google.

Nothing is preventing them from cutting deals with other search engines if they want to keep doing that.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

I feel like Mozilla is a big money laundering scheme at this point. It only exist so chrome isn't a monopoly, and I pretty sure the CEO and several other workers are getting paid an obscene amount to do nothing all day while only 20% of the money actually goes toward working on the browser.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, I don't care. Just do it.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 day ago

tldr: but muh paycheck!

[–] jaxiiruff 17 points 1 day ago

Oh my fucking god Servo cannot get here soon enough.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

It's certainly better than the status quo. Sure, Mozilla will hurt at first because they've put their revenue source in the same basket, but it's an opportunity to grow back.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago (2 children)

There are other search engines. Maybe Firefox can partner with them.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I'm guessing that once Google is prohibited from providing incentives, the bottom will fall out of that particular market and those other search engines will likely pay less, if anything, for the privilege.

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